


Closer than heaven

by uumuu



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Intra-Series Crossover, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-19 21:11:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7377607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the woods near Silent Hill, Heather tries to deal with ghosts and makes a new acquaintance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Closer than heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [townshend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/townshend/gifts).



Emerging from among the trees onto a narrow path at the foot of the hill, absorbed in her own sombre thoughts, Heather nearly collided with a man who happened to walk by at that very moment. Her head shot up, and her heart skipped a beat. 

_Vincent._

But no, it wasn't Vincent. It couldn't have been. The man had almost the exact same hair colour, a shade of dirty light brown she could never forget, but haircut and face were completely different. 

She pointedly looked him over, to dispel the overlapping phantom of the dead, but also in response to something akin to a defensive reflex, the mistrustful instinct of a wary animal. That sort of scrutiny made other people uneasy, made them wary in turn. She couldn't help it. She had to have a clear idea of who she had to deal with. The man was average height, unshaven, his hair falling down straight to frame his face more thanks to its natural smoothness than from any care applied to it. He wore a plain coat and plain trousers, his boots were muddied and worn. A thoroughly uninteresting, bland type. She almost laughed in his face for having mistaken him for someone as sharp-edged as Vincent. 

“What are you doing here?” she blurted instead, in a clipped tone.

It wasn't just frustration, embarrassment at how his sudden appearance had broken into her thoughts, drawing out the worst of them. It was also the fact that he was staring right back at her without uttering a word or showing any sort of emotion. He didn't even seem to take note of the unfriendliness in her tone. He opened his mouth, but didn't speak right away, not much at any rate. 

“I –” He slowly turned to his right, gesturing towards the lake. “I come from the orphanage.” 

His speech was sluggish, as if he weren't entirely awake, word plodding after word like footsteps in a swamp. 

“My name's Henry,” he added when Heather didn't reply. His right arm twitched, as if he had to resist the urge to stretch it out towards her. 

“I'm Ch –” Heather began, but quickly caught herself. She didn't want to call herself 'Cheryl' so close to Silent Hill, and she didn't see why she should let this stranger met by utter chance near her cursed hometown know her true name. “- Heather.” 

And with that she turned on her heel and started down the path again. 

Henry resumed walking too, though at a distance from her. His footsteps sounded strangely heavy, and were as slow as his speech. For some reason, his presence didn't make her uncomfortable, and as she fell back into her brisk stride, Heather slipped back into her thoughts at the same time, let them prod and nip at her. Douglas had been against her coming back to Silent Hill, but Douglas knew her stubbornness well, and when she had insisted, he drove her there himself. Knowing that he was waiting in the car park made her feel safer, more grounded in reality. She herself had no clear idea why she had wanted to come back to Silent Hill. What she was looking for, if there was anything left for her to seek at all. If there was one thing she was certain of, was that her roots were still deeply planted here, and it was doubtful she'd ever be able to pull them out. 

She trod on fallen leaves, skirted pine cones. The day was cold, but it was still early afternoon, and the sun shone in a cloudless sky. Time passed, and she completely forgot that Henry was there. When she slowed down her pace – they were drawing close to old Silent Hill – he was soon walking next to her. 

“Where do you come from?” she asked him, making a conscious effort not to sound overbearing or accusing. She threw him a sidelong glance. 

Henry walked with his head bowed, staring at the ground, though his eyes didn't seem too focused. 

“I live in South Ashfield,” he replied in the same emotionless tone as before. 

“South Ashfield.” The name was familiar. “A...friend of mine knows someone there. He's a detective, and –”

“Frank Sunderland?”

Heather turned towards Henry, taking a second good look at him. “You live in South Ashfield Heights?”

“I used to.” Something stole over Henry's face, but Heather couldn't have said what it was. “I...heard Frank's son disappeared here, in Silent Hill.”

“Yeah, my friend was asked to look for him. Though he never found him.”

“Is that why you're here?”

“No.” Heather shook her head. “No.” She had asked Douglas once or twice about the missing person's case that had taken him to Silent Hill for the first time, but she wasn't particularly interested in it, not when she had already so much on her mind. 

There was the faint echo of a noise from the road, perhaps a large truck, muffled by the trees and the distance. The road wasn't very trafficked. Heather doubted any tourists visited Silent Hill any longer, but people still lived there, seemingly oblivious to the horrors that had unfolded on their doorstep only a few years before. Heather glanced to her right: she could barely make out the blue of the lake, above the tree-tops. Toluca lake too was unchanged, shimmering under the sunlight, serene, indifferent to sorrow and death. 

A breeze wafted down from the hill and a shiver trickled down her spine. Her voice came out of its own accord. “Have you heard?”

“Heard what?”

“There is...laughter, coming from the woods.”

Henry let his gaze roam over the hill, seemingly giving the assertion serious consideration, though what he mumbled at last was, “I haven't heard anything.”

“I'm sorry,” Heather quickly said, sinking her hands in the pockets of her heavy jacket. “I know that sounds weird, I'm sure it's just –”

“No, no,” Henry interrupted, with a decisiveness he didn't seem capable of. “I believe you,” he said simply, without making any other remarks or asking for explanations. 

He didn't ask her why she had said that. Heather couldn't tell whether it was because of disinterest or tact, or lack of emotion. It didn't sound like he was making fun of her. At that moment, the idea that he could understand didn't even cross her mind. She merely reflected that if he didn't hear the laughter, it could only mean it wasn't real laughter, just as she had suspected. She looked at her feet. The bed of leaves and pine needles under her feet was soft, but slimy because of the humidity. She didn't like it. Who knew what could lurk under dead leaves... 

“This is my second time here,” Henry said, unprompted. “I wanted to see the ruins of the orphanage...” 

His voice broke off in a mumble. Heather thought she heard 'again'.

“You were raised there?”

“No, thankfully not,” he denied, and for the first time some real emotion seemed to seep into his voice. Heather was about to ask him why he had wanted to return there, scraps of information from an article she had once read surfacing in her memory, but before she could he said: “those must be the ruins of the hotel.”

She froze, her gaze fixing on the view ahead of them. She hadn't realised they had walked past the north-west corner of the lake already. The ruins of the hotel were below them, across the road now visible among sparser trees, and just a little further on the trees completely gave way to the jarring shapes and gaudy colours of the attractions in the amusement park. A little to the north was Old Silent Hill, with Midwich elementary school, the church and _everything else_. Closer than heaven, indeed. 

“Do you want to look for the person who's laughing?” Henry ventured, noticing her hesitation. 

Heather shook herself, grateful for that suggestion, even though the matter of the strange laughter she kept hearing coming from the woods seemed insignificant next to _Silent Hill and its dormant host of ghosts_. She didn't have the courage to actually go there. Besides, even if she did get to Old Silent Hill, even if she were to step into Midwich elementary school in broad daylight, she would not see the place Alessa had been bullied in, much less the place her father had seen. 

“You don't mind?”

Henry shrugged his shoulders. 

The hill wasn't too steep at first. There were no footpaths among the spruce and pine trees, but they weren't particularly thick and picking their way among them was easier than Heather had expected. Halfway up, she mused on the wisdom of going deep into the woods with a man she had just met, but re-assured herself that she could sense danger near her. She had faced plenty of monsters already. She wrapped her fingers around the switchblade knife in the pocket of her jacket, a present Douglas had given her on her nineteenth birthday, making a jesting remark on how she had handled much more dangerous weapons. 

They had almost made it to the top when suddenly there was peal of laughter. High, tinkling, cheery laughter rolling down the hill from further up in the forest. A distinct sound. Henry stopped mid-step, and his eyes widened a little, an obvious sign that he had heard it too. He strained his ears.

“Over there,” he said, pointing at a spot slightly on the right. 

He turned in the direction, but Heather sprinted past him, climbing the hill in long strides that made her heartbeat go wild. She was out of breath when exhaustion forced her to stop, and once she did, she raised her head to take in the new surroundings. 

All she saw were leaves, bright yellow leaves.

“Poplars,” murmured Henry, turning to look back while he too caught his breath. 

Heather frowned. She didn't remember seeing any poplars from afar, when she had left the road to venture into the woods. The golden leaves blanketed the forest floor, yet the trees seemed to be missing none. They were sparse, and lined up so regularly that they could almost have passed for fancy columns holding up the vault of an invisible building. The impression was reinforced by the fact that the sun had disappeared from the sky, and sudden fog coiled thick among the trees, except for a single spot, where a strange mound rose from the sea of gold. Heather rushed to it, and without a second thought began uncovering it.

“It's a gravestone,” she said, when an oblong rock became visible. She peeled away a few leaves that had stuck to where the name was engraved in large, uneven letters, not the work of a professional for sure. The stone itself was little more than a simple boulder. She tried to make out the letters, feeling them with her fingers rather than actually reading them. Henry came up behind her, dislodging heaps of leaves with each of his strides. Heather threw a glance at him over her shoulder. She had but a moment to process the name her fingers spelled out for her.

“You are the first ones to find my special place,” a female voice said. 

A woman stood half-hiding behind the slender trunk of a poplar, like a child who had happened upon an expected game of hide and seek, and was eager to join. She peeked around the trunk, her eyes darting to where Heather's fingers still touched the gravestone. 

Heather took her hands away from it and straightened, taking a step back. 

The woman came forward. 

Heather's eyes widened.

“Are you two married?”

Heather didn't reply in any way, but from the corner of her eye saw Henry shake his head. 

The woman giggled, a shorter, quieter variation of the laughter that had filled the woods. “Friends then I suppose. You don't look like siblings. What took you up here?”

 _'I don't want anything to do with your special place'_ , Heather wanted to retort, but bit her tongue. The trees were beautiful, but made her claustrophobic. And that fog everywhere. Those tricky fallen leaves. The smell of rotten wood. It was almost nauseating.

“Oh I know. You too are mesmerised by the beauty of this place, aren't you?” the woman offered. “It's so quiet and peaceful, a balm for the soul. You can see the lake too, from the top of the trees. Would you like to see the lake? It's so beautiful – the lake, the trees, a true land of the gods. You too could –”

“This – this is no place of gods!” Heather snapped.

The woman shut her mouth in a thin line, and her gaze darkened.

“Mary? Is something wrong?”

The male voice appeared out of nowhere, like the fog had. Heather could just make out the shape of a man's silhouette behind them woman from where she stood before Henry grabbed her arm and started dragging her away from the poplars. She yelped in surprise, but she was glad to leave that place, and ran with him, sprinted down the hill until they were back on the path, back under the sun, now declining in darker hues of orange.

“I think...we did find Frank's son,” Henry panted, crouching forward with his hands on his thighs.

“And his wife,” Heather finished, leaning against a fir tree. A sturdy, knotty, _real_ tree. “Mary Sunderland. That was the name on the gravestone.”

“...there was...blood trailing behind him.”

“And she didn't even move a leaf when she walked. What do you think happened to them?”

Henry straightened and opened his arms. Heather couldn't make any guesses herself, beyond the obvious conclusion that they were both dead.

“I wonder,” Henry began, his voice, if possible, even quieter than before, “I wonder if I should tell Frank. He was kind to me when I moved in South Ashfield Heights, and kind to me when I moved out.”

“Why did you move out?”

Henry's eyes flickered over the leaves on the ground, lost in memory, then met Heather's. “It's a...long story.”

The third time Heather took a good look at Henry, she understood that they were, in some way, the same, that Silent Hill had brought them together not by utter chance. His eyes may have not been penetrating or shrewd, but they were kind, and held that peculiar sadness of someone who has seen something no-one should ever see, and was attuned to its dangers. Perhaps she had found something after all.

“Let's go back,” she urged. “My friend, the detective, he's waiting for me in the car. You could talk it over with him. We could give you a ride, too. If you need, that is.”

Henry blinked at her a few times, then his lips stretched in a small, sheepish smile.

“What?” 

“You didn't seem very talkative.”

Heather quirked an eyebrow. “ _I_ didn't?” she quipped, crossing her arms over her chest. “Well, let's get out of here and then maybe we can have a real conversation ourselves.”

“Yeah...Silent Hill isn't the best place for that, I guess.” 

“No, definitely not.” 

Heather gave one last look at the woods surrounding them, then turned her back on her hometown, and she and Henry started walking again, side by side.


End file.
